Bittersweet How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain Book Read Online And Epub File Download
Overview: In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.
“Bittersweet grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.”—BRENÉ BROWN, author of Atlas of the Heart
“Susan Cain has described and validated my existence once again!”—GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed
“A sparkling ode to the beauty of the human condition.”—ADAM GRANT, author of Think Again
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Oprah Daily, BookPage
Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death —bitter and sweet—are forever paired.
Bittersweet How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain Book Read Online Chapter One
What is sadness good for?
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
—NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
In 2010, celebrated Pixar director Pete Docter decided to make an animated film about the wild and woolly emotions of an eleven-year-old girl named Riley. He knew the rough outlines of the story he wanted to tell. The film would open with Riley, uprooted from her Minnesota hometown and plunked down in a new house and school in San Francisco, while also caught in the emotional storm of incoming adolescence.
So far, so good. But Docter faced a creative puzzle. He wanted to depict Riley’s feelings as lovable animated characters running a control center in her brain, shaping her memories and daily life. But which feelings? Psychologists told him that we have up to twenty-seven different emotions. But you can’t tell a good story about so many different characters. Docter needed to narrow it down, and to pick one emotion as the main protagonist.
He considered a few different emotions for the starring role, then decided to place Fear at the center of the movie, alongside Joy; partly, he says, because Fear is funny. He considered Sadness, but this seemed unappealing. Docter had grown up in Minnesota, where, he told me, the sanguine norms were clear: “The idea that you’d cry in front of people was very uncool.”
But three years into the development of the film—with the dialogue already done, the movie partially animated, the gags with Fear already in place, some of them “quite inspired”—he realized that something was wrong. Docter was scheduled to screen the film-in-progress for Pixar’s executive team. And he was sure it was a failure. The third act didn’t work. According to the film’s narrative arc, Joy should have learned a great lesson. But Fear had nothing to teach her.
At that point in his career, Docter had enjoyed two mega-successes—Up and Monsters, Inc. But he started to feel sure that these hits were flukes.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he thought. “I should just quit.”
His mind spun into dark daydreams of a post-Pixar future in which he’d lost not only his job but also his career. He went into preemptive mourning. The thought of living outside his treasured community of creatives and business mavericks made him feel he was drowning—in Sadness. And the more despondent he grew, the more he realized how much he loved his colleagues.
Which led to his epiphany: The real reason for his emotions—for all our emotions—is to connect us. And Sadness, of all the emotions, was the ultimate bonding agent.
“I suddenly had an idea that we needed to get Fear out of there,” he recalls now, “and Sadness connected with Joy.” The only problem was, he had to convince John Lasseter, who ran Pixar at the time, to place Sadness at the heart of the movie. And he was worried that this would be a tough sell.
Docter tells me this story as we sit in the airy, light-filled atrium designed by Steve Jobs for Pixar’s Emeryville, California, campus. We’re surrounded by larger-than-life sculptures of Pixar characters—the Parr family from The Incredibles, Buzz from Toy Story, all of them striking poses by sky-high glass windows. Docter enjoys cult status at Pixar. Earlier that day, I’d led an executive session on harnessing the talents of introverted filmmakers, and a few minutes into the proceedings, Docter had bounded into the conference room, instantly lighting up the room with his warmth.
Docter resembles an animated character himself, drawn mainly of rectangles. He has a gangly six-foot-four frame and a long face, half of which is forehead. Even his teeth are long and rectangular, the beanpoles of the dental world. But his most salient feature is the animation of his facial expressions. His smiles and grimaces convey a bright, winsome sensitivity. When he was a kid, his family moved to Copenhagen so his father could research a Ph.D. on Danish choral music. Docter didn’t speak the language and had no idea what the other kids were saying. The pain of that experience drew him to animation; it was easier to draw people than talk to them. Even now, he’s apt to create characters who live in treehouses and float away into a wordless dreamscape.
Docter was concerned that the executive team would find Sadness too glum, too dark. The animators had drawn the character as dowdy, squat, and blue. Why would you place a figure like that at the center of a movie? Who would want to identify with her?
Throughout this process, Docter had an unlikely ally: Dacher Keltner, an influential University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor. Docter had called in Keltner to educate him and his colleagues on the science of emotions. They became close friends. Keltner’s daughter was suffering the slings and arrows of adolescence at the same time as Docter’s, and the two men bonded over vicarious angst. Keltner taught Docter and his team the functions of each major emotion: Fear keeps you safe. Anger protects you from getting taken advantage of. And Sadness—what does Sadness do?
Keltner had explained that Sadness triggers compassion. It brings people together. It helps you see just how much your community of quirky Pixar filmmakers means to you.
The executive team approved the idea, and Docter and his team rewrote the movie—which ultimately won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was the highest grossing original film in Pixar history—with Sadness in the starring role.[*]
• • •
When you first meet Dacher Keltner—who has flowing blond locks; the relaxed, athletic aura of a surfer; and a lighthouse-beam smile—he seems an unlikely ambassador for Sadness. His default state seems more like Joy. He radiates warmth and caring, and has a sincere politician’s gift for seeing and appreciating others. Keltner runs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab and the Greater Good Science Center, two of the world’s most influential positive psychology labs, where his job is to study the emotional goodies of being alive: wonder, awe, happiness.
But spend some time with Keltner and you notice that the corners of his eyes turn down like a basset hound’s, and that he describes himself as anxious and melancholic—as a bittersweet type. “Sadness is at the core of who I am,” he tells me. In my book Quiet, I described the research of psychologists Jerome Kagan and Elaine Aron, which found that 15 to 20 percent of babies inherit a temperament that predisposes them to react more intensely to life’s uncertainty as well as its glory. Keltner considers himself what Kagan would call a born “high-reactive,” or what Aron would call “highly sensitive.”
Keltner was raised in a wild and starry-eyed 1970s household. His father was a firefighter and painter who took him to art museums and taught him Taoism, his mother a literature professor who read him Romantic poetry and was especially fond of D. H. Lawrence. Keltner and his younger brother, Rolf, who were very close, roamed around nature at all hours of the day and night. Their parents encouraged them to figure out their core passions, and to build a life around them.
But in their quest to experience life in all its intensity, Keltner’s parents moved the family at a dizzying pace: from a small town in Mexico, where he was born in a tiny clinic; to Laurel Canyon, a countercultural California neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, where they lived next door to Jackson Browne’s pianist and Keltner went to second grade at a school called Wonderland; to a rural farm town in the Sierra foothills, where few of his fifth-grade classmates were destined for college. By the time the family arrived in Nottingham, England, when Keltner was in high school, his parents’ marriage had imploded. His father fell in love with the wife of a family friend; his mother started traveling back and forth to Paris to study experimental theater. Keltner and Rolf, left on their own, got drunk and threw parties. They were never a foursome again.
On the outside Keltner seemed—seems still—like a golden child. But the abrupt shattering had what he describes as a “long, enduring sad effect” on him and his family. His father mostly disappeared; his mother became clinically depressed; Keltner suffered three years of full-blown panic attacks. Rolf, who would grow up to be a dedicated speech therapist in an impoverished community, and a devoted husband and father, battled the demons of what one physician diagnosed as bipolar disorder: insomnia, binge eating, and regular consumption of beer and marijuana to calm his nerves.
Of all these unravelings, it was Rolf’s struggles that shook Keltner most. Partly because his brother had been his anchor from the time they were small: In every neighborhood into which they crash-landed, they were boon companions, fellow explorers of the new terrain, tennis partners who never lost a doubles match. When the family fell apart, they fended for themselves, together.
But Rolf was also his exemplar. He was only a year younger, but, by Keltner’s account, he was bigger, braver, kinder: the most “morally beautiful” person he ever knew. He was modest and humble, in contrast with Keltner’s more driven and competitive nature; he never met an underdog he didn’t love. In one of their many hometowns lived a girl named Elena, who grew up in a ramshackle house with a front lawn that looked like a junkyard. Elena was underfed, her hair stringy and unwashed, the favorite target of local bullies. And Rolf, who was neither the largest nor the strongest kid in his grade, defended her constantly from her many tormentors. That guy is courageous out of compassion, Keltner thought. I want to be like him.
When Keltner emerged from adolescence and began to survey the family wreckage, he suspected that it was his parents’ commitment to high passion that had caused their family so much trouble. And even though he had an artistic, romantic temperament, he was also a born scientist—one who decided to study human emotions when he grew up. Emotions like the awe, wonder, and joy that had always been so central to him, Rolf, and his parents. And emotions like the sadness inside Keltner and his family, and inside so many of us.
• • •
One of the cornerstones of Keltner’s research, which he summarized in his book Born to Be Good, is what he calls “the compassionate instinct”—the idea that we humans are wired to respond to each other’s troubles with care. Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe.
The compassionate instinct is also a fundamental aspect of the human success story—and one of the great powers of bittersweetness. The word compassion literally means “to suffer together,” and Keltner sees it as one of our best and most redemptive qualities. The sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of connection and love; it’s what the musician Nick Cave calls “the universal unifying force.” Sorrow and tears are one of the strongest bonding mechanisms we have.
The compassionate instinct is wired so deeply throughout our nervous system that it appears to trace back to our earliest evolutionary history. For example, if someone pinches you or burns your skin, this activates the anterior cingulate region of your cortex (ACC)—the more recently developed, uniquely human part of the brain responsible for your ability to perform high-level tasks such as paying your taxes and planning a party. And your ACC activates in the same way when you see someone else get pinched or burned. But Keltner also found the compassionate instinct in the more instinctive and evolutionarily ancient parts of our nervous system: in the mammalian region known as the periaqueductal gray, which is located in the center of the brain, and causes mothers to nurture their young; and in an even older, deeper, and more fundamental part of the nervous system known as the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to the neck and torso, and is the largest and one of our most important bundles of nerves.
It’s long been known that the vagus nerve is connected to digestion, sex, and breathing—to the mechanics of being alive. But in several replicated studies, Keltner discovered another of its purposes: When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care. If you see a photo of a man wincing in pain, or a child weeping for her dying grandmother, your vagus nerve will fire. Keltner also found that people with especially strong vagus nerves—he calls them vagal superstars—are more likely to cooperate with others and to have strong friendships. They’re more likely (like Rolf) to intervene when they see someone being bullied, or to give up recess to tutor a classmate who’s struggling with math.
Keltner’s isn’t the only research to show this connection between sadness and unity. The Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene and the Princeton neuroscientist and psychologist Jonathan Cohen, for example, found that people asked to consider the suffering of victims of violence displayed activation of the same brain region as a previous study had shown of besotted mothers gazing at pictures of their babies. The Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns found that helping people in need stimulates the same brain region as winning a prize or eating a delicious meal. We also know that depressed (and formerly depressed) people are more likely to see the world from others’ points of view and to experience compassion; conversely, high-empathy people are more likely than others to enjoy sad music. “Depression deepens our natural empathy,” observes Tufts University psychiatry professor Nassir Ghaemi, “and produces someone for whom the inescapable web of interdependence…is a personal reality, not a fanciful wish.”
These findings have enormous implications. They tell us that our impulse to respond to other beings’ sadness sits in the same location as our need to breathe, digest food, reproduce, and protect our babies; in the same place as our desire to be rewarded and to enjoy life’s pleasures. They tell us, as Keltner explained to me, that “caring is right at the heart of human existence. Sadness is about caring. And the mother of sadness is compassion.”
If you want to experience Keltner’s findings viscerally, watch this brilliant four-minute video that went unexpectedly viral: youtube.com/watch?v=cDDWvj_q-o8. Produced by the Cleveland Clinic as part of a campaign to instill empathy in its caregivers, the video takes you on a short walk through the hospital corridors, the camera lingering on the faces of random passersby, people we’d normally walk past without giving a second thought—except that this time there are subtitles telling us their unseen trials (and occasional triumphs): “Tumor is malignant.” “Husband is terminally ill.” “Visiting Dad for the last time.” “Recently divorced.” And: “Just found out he’s going to be a dad.”
• • •
So. What happened? Maybe a tear came to your eyes? Maybe a lump in your throat, maybe the physical sensation of an opening heart? Maybe soaring feelings of love for this random swath of humanity, followed by an intellectual commitment to start paying attention to the people you pass every day, not only in the corridors of a hospital but also the guy at the gas pump and your overly talkative co-worker? Those reactions were likely influenced by your vagus nerve, your anterior cingulate cortex, your periaqueductal gray: processing people you’ve never met as if their pain is your own. As, in fact, it is.
Many of us have long perceived the power of sadness to unite us, without fully articulating it, or thinking to express it in neuroscientific terms. Years ago, when this book was still a gleam in my eye, I gave a blog interview to author Gretchen Rubin on what I then called “the happiness of melancholy.” A young woman responded with her own blogpost, reflecting on her grandfather’s funeral, and the “union between souls” she experienced there.
My grandfather’s barbershop chorus sang him a tribute and, for the first time in my fourteen years, I witnessed tears cascading down my father’s face. That moment—with the lilting sound of men’s voices, the hushed audience, and my father’s sadness—is permanently etched on my heart. And when our family first had to euthanize a pet, the love in that room—shared by my father, brother, and me—took my breath away. You see, when I think of these events, it is not the sadness that I most remember. It is the union between souls. When we experience sadness, we share in a common suffering. It is one of the few times when people allow themselves to be truly vulnerable. It is a time when our culture allows us to be completely honest about how we feel. [Emphasis added.]
Feeling deprived of the ability to express these insights in her daily life, the young woman turned to art:
My affinity for serious movies and thought-provoking novels is all an attempt to recreate the beauty of my life’s most honest moments. I recognize that, in order to function in society, we cannot all walk around with our hearts constantly overflowing, so I visit these moments in my mind, re-experience them through art, and appreciate the occurrence of new, utterly vulnerable moments when they come.
But maybe we need to move these moments into everyday life—and to understand their evolutionary underpinnings. We’re living, famously, through a time in which we have trouble connecting with others, especially outside our “tribes.” And Keltner’s work shows us that sadness—Sadness, of all things!—has the power to create the “union between souls” that we so desperately lack.
• • •
But if we’re going to fully grasp the power of sadness, there’s one more piece of our primate heritage we need to understand. Have you ever wondered why we react with such visceral intensity to media images of starving or orphaned children? Why does the thought of children separated from their parents cause such deep and universal distress?
The answer lies deep in our evolutionary history. Our compassionate instinct appears to originate not just with any connection between humans, but with the mother-child bond—with the all-consuming desire of mothers to respond to their crying infants. From there it radiates outward, to other beings in need of care.
Human babies are, as Keltner puts it, “the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth,” unable to function without the help of benevolent adults. We’re born this fragile to accommodate our enormous brains, which would be too big to fit through the birth canal if we arrived after they fully developed. But our “premature” birth date turns out to be one of the more hopeful facts about our species. It means that the more intelligent our species grew, the more sympathetic we had to become, in order to take care of our hopelessly dependent young. We needed to decipher their inscrutable cries. We needed to feed them, we needed to love them.
This might not mean so much if our compassion extended strictly to our own offspring. But because we were primed to care for small and vulnerable infants in general, says Keltner, we also developed the capacity to care for anything infant-like—from a houseplant to a stranger in distress. We aren’t the only mammals to do this. Orca whales will circle a mother who has lost her calf. Elephants soothe each other by gently touching their trunks to the faces of fellow elephants. But humans, Keltner told me, “have taken compassion to a whole new level. There’s nothing like our capacity for sorrow and caring for things that are lost or in need.”
Our horror at the news of suffering children, in other words, comes from our impulse to protect the young. If we can’t cherish kids, we know instinctively, we can’t cherish anyone.
Of course, we shouldn’t be too impressed with this nurturing instinct of ours. It’s still our own babies’ cries that sound most urgent to us; we seem to have a lot less sympathy for other people’s infants, for other adults, and even for our own grumpy adolescents. The fact that our compassion seems to dwindle the further we get from our own offspring’s cradles—not to mention our species’ appetite for cruelty—is as dispiriting as Keltner’s findings are encouraging.
But Keltner doesn’t see it this way. This is partly because of his brother, Rolf, who taught him to care for the vulnerable. This is also partly because he practices loving-kindness meditation, which (as we’ll see in chapter 4) teaches us to treasure others as we do our beloved children. (“And I think we can get close,” Keltner says.) But it’s also because of what he learned from Charles Darwin.
Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy.
For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.”
Early in Darwin’s career, he lost his beloved ten-year-old daughter, Annie, to scarlet fever—an event that may have shaped his worldview, according to biographers Deborah Heiligman and Adam Gopnik. He was so grief-stricken that he couldn’t attend her burial. Annie had been a joyous child who loved to snuggle with her mother and to spend hours arranging her father’s hair, as Darwin tenderly recorded in his diary. “Oh Mamma, what should we do, if you were to die,” Annie had cried when she had to separate from her mother. But it was her mother and father, Emma and Charles Darwin, who had to endure that tragedy. “We have lost the joy of the Household,” wrote Darwin in his diary, upon Annie’s death, “and the solace of our old age.”
In what many consider one of Darwin’s greatest books, The Descent of Man, which he wrote some two decades later, he argued that compassion is our strongest instinct:
The social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of his fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them….Such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time. [Emphasis added.]
Darwin noted example after example of beings reacting viscerally to the suffering of other beings: The dog who took care, every time he passed it, to lick a sick cat in his household. The crows who patiently fed their blind and elderly companion. The monkey who risked his life to save a beloved zookeeper from a hostile baboon. Of course, Darwin didn’t know about the vagal nerve, the anterior cingulate cortex, or the periaqueductal gray. But he intuited their compassionate function, some 150 years before Dacher Keltner would demonstrate it in his lab. “We are impelled to relieve the sufferings of another,” wrote Darwin, “in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved.”
Like Keltner, Darwin also intuited that these behaviors evolved from the instinct of parents to care for their young. We shouldn’t look for sympathy in animals that have no contact with their mothers or fathers, he said.
Darwin was no naïf, blind to nature’s brutality. On the contrary, he was consumed by these observations precisely because, in the words of one biographer, “he felt the world’s pain so acutely, and so persistently.” He knew that animals often behave viciously, as when they “expel a wounded” member from their troop or gore it to death. He knew that compassion is strongest within families and weaker with out-groups; that it’s often absent altogether; and that it’s difficult for humans to see other species as “fellow creatures” deserving of sympathy. But he also saw that extending the compassionate instinct as far out as we could, from our own family to humanity in general, and ultimately to all sentient beings, would be “one of the noblest” moral achievements of which we’re capable.
Indeed, when the Dalai Lama heard about this aspect of Darwin’s work, he was astonished by its similarity to Tibetan Buddhism. (“I will now call myself a Darwinian,” he said.) Both Darwinism and Buddhism view compassion as the greatest virtue, and the mother-infant bond as the heart of sympathy. As the Dalai Lama put it, in a dialogue with the University of California, San Francisco, psychology professor emeritus Dr. Paul Ekman, “In the human mind, seeing someone bleeding and dying makes you uncomfortable. That’s the seed of compassion. In those animals, like turtles, not dealing with a mother, I don’t think they have a capacity for affection.”
How to explain what Ekman calls this “amazing coincidence, if it is a coincidence,” between Darwinian and Buddhist thought? Perhaps, says Ekman, Darwin was exposed to Tibetan Buddhism by his friend Joseph Hooker, a botanist who spent time in Tibet studying its flora. Maybe Darwin developed these ideas in the church of the Galapagos wilderness, on his famous voyage of the Beagle. Or, possibly, he forged them in the crucible of his own experience—of loving and losing his daughter Annie.
• • •
We tend to place compassion on the “positive” side of the ledger of human emotions, notwithstanding this decidedly bittersweet view of it as the product of shared sorrow. Indeed, Keltner’s life work is grounded in the field of “positive psychology,” the study of human flourishing. The term was coined by Abraham Maslow in 1954, and later championed and popularized by psychologist Martin Seligman, as an antidote to what both men believed was psychology’s excessive focus on mental illness rather than strength. They wanted to discover the practices and mindsets that would make our hearts sing, and our lives well-lived. Seligman was hugely successful in this quest. The countless articles you’ve likely read urging you to start a gratitude journal or take up mindfulness meditation can be traced to his movement, and to the vast army of practitioners inspired by it.
But the field has also drawn criticism for ignoring an important swath of human experience—such as sorrow and longing. Critics have charged that it’s biased toward an American sensibility that, as the psychologist Nancy McWilliams puts it, “subscribe[s] to…the comic rather than the tragic version of human life, the pursuit of happiness rather than the coming to terms with inevitable pain.”
This isn’t surprising; the entire field of psychology hasn’t paid much attention to the human potential in bittersweetness. If you’re a melancholic type, you might expect to find your deepest stirrings reflected somewhere in the discipline. But other than the “high sensitivity” paradigm, the closest you’ll come is the study of a personality trait called “neuroticism,” which is about as appealing as the name sounds. According to modern personality psychology, neurotics are fretful and insecure. They’re prone to illness, anxiety, and depression.
Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they’re vigilant types who take good care of their health. They’re strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They’re good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle. For an entrepreneur, the psychiatrist Amy Iversen told a publication called Management Today, the tendency to ruminate “can be channeled into obsessively thinking through a user experience, advertising strategy, or how to pitch a new idea, in the same way a creative could use this energy to memorise every line of a film script, or hone the finest detail of a play’s production.”
Experts like Iversen present these upsides as useful adaptations to an undesirable condition. But there’s nothing inherently elevating in this view, no notion of Baudelaire’s beautiful melancholy, or of a great, transformative longing at the heart of human nature (and in the hearts of some humans in particular). There’s also little awareness that, as we’ll continue to explore, these states are some of the great catalysts of human creativity, spirituality, and love. Many psychologists are not religious themselves, so it doesn’t occur to them to look for spiritual answers to humanity’s greatest mysteries.
Recently, though, positive psychology has begun to make room for the bittersweet. Psychologists such as Dr. Paul Wong, the president of Toronto’s Meaning-Centered Counselling Institute, and University of East London lecturer Tim Lomas have documented the emergence of a “second wave” that, as Lomas says, “recognizes that well-being actually involves a subtle, dialectical interplay between positive and negative phenomena.” And, through his influential book Transcend, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman is reviving Maslow’s original concept of positive psychology, which recognized a bittersweet personality style Maslow called “transcenders”: people who “are less ‘happy’ than the [conventionally] healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of ‘happiness,’ but they are as prone—or maybe more prone—to a kind of cosmic sadness.”
All of which bodes well for our ability, as individuals and as a culture, to realize the transformative potential of Keltner’s work. If we could honor sadness a little more, maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. We could remember that no matter how distasteful we might find someone’s opinions, no matter how radiant, or fierce, someone may appear, they have suffered, or they will.
• • •
Keltner, and the Greater Good Science Center that he co-founded, have developed many science-tested practices that can help us do exactly this.
An important first step is to cultivate humility. We know from various studies that attitudes of superiority prevent us from reacting to others’ sadness—and even to our own. “Your vagus nerve won’t fire when you see a child who’s starving,” says Keltner, “if you think you’re better than other people.” Amazingly, high-ranking people (including those artificially given high status, in a lab setting) are more likely to ignore pedestrians and to cut off other drivers, and are less helpful to their colleagues and to others in need. They’re less likely to experience physical and emotional pain when holding their own hands under scalding water, when excluded from a game, or when witnessing the suffering of others. They’re even more likely to take more than their fair share of candy handed out by the lab staff!
How then to achieve humility (especially if you find yourself in a relatively fortunate socio-economic position)? One answer is to practice the simple act of bowing down, as the Japanese do in everyday social life, and as many religious people do before God. This gesture actually activates the vagus nerve, according to Keltner. “People are starting to think about the mind-body interface in these acts of reverence,” he explained in a 2016 Silicon Valley talk.
Of course, many Americans are irreligious, or uncomfortable with expressions of submission, or both. But we can think of these gestures as devotion rather than capitulation. Indeed, many of us practice yoga, which often includes a bowing element; and when we behold an awe-inspiring work of art, or vista in nature, we instinctively lower our heads.
We can also take to our keyboards. The social psychologist and Leavey School of Business management professor Dr. Hooria Jazaieri suggests a writing exercise in which we describe a time when someone showed us compassion, or we felt it for someone else. If formal writing doesn’t appeal to us, we can try keeping a simple log of when we feel more or less engaged with the sadness of others. “Collect your own data,” advises Jazaieri on the Greater Good Science Center website. “For example, you could notice when compassion comes easily or spontaneously for you throughout the day (e.g., watching the evening news). You could notice when you resist acknowledging or being with suffering (your own or others’) throughout the day (e.g., when passing someone on the street who is asking for money or an extended family member who is challenging)….We often notice suffering (our own and that of others) but quickly dismiss it and thus do not allow ourselves to be emotionally touched or moved by the suffering.”
But perhaps none of this is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. This may sound like the opposite of what you’d do to encourage humility. But many of us engage, without even realizing it, in a constant stream of negative self-talk: “You’re terrible at this.” “Why did you screw that up?” But, as Jazaieri observes, “There’s no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in fact, some data suggests that this type of criticism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them.”
Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we’ll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath—and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you’d extend to a beloved child—literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you’d shower on an adorable three-year-old. If this strikes you as hopelessly self-indulgent, remember that you’re not babying yourself, or letting yourself off the hook. You’re taking care of yourself, so that your self can go forth and care for others.
• • •
Keltner—the psychologist-phenom with the golden locks, surfer aura, and sad eyes, who’d worked with Pete Docter and his band of Pixar filmmakers—has had plenty of cause to practice his own self-compassion. When I caught up with him recently, his youngest daughter had just left for college, leaving his home too quiet and empty. His mother was lonely, depressed, and had a heart condition. And Rolf, his adored younger brother, had died of colon cancer, at age fifty-six, after a long struggle with the disease.
Keltner was reeling, and suffering a profound sense of rootlessness. He felt as if he were missing part of his soul. “There’s no doubt my life will be full of sadness for however many more decades I get,” he told me. “I’m not sure I’ll get a sense of place and community in this life.”
I knew how much he loved his brother, but I was surprised anyway when he put it like that. Keltner runs one of the most influential labs in one of academia’s most meaningful fields. He’s a popular professor at one of the most vibrant universities in the world. He has a wife of thirty years and two grown daughters and countless friends he loves. If he didn’t have a sense of place and community, then who would?
But Keltner also knew that sadness gives rise to compassion—for others, and for oneself. Throughout his brother’s illness and death, he’d followed the practices he’d always known. Inspired by Rolf’s natural kindness, he’d long volunteered with convicted criminals at nearby San Quentin prison. “I become most clear when I’m engaged in suffering,” he explains. “Sadness is like a meditation on compassion. You have this burst of: There’s harm there, there’s need there. Then I leave the prison. I think about my brother, and it’s like a meditative state. I’ve always felt that way about the human condition. I’m not a tragic person. I’m hopeful. But I think sadness is beautiful and sadness is wise.”
During Rolf’s last month, Keltner also performed a daily exercise of gratitude toward his brother: “the things he’s done, the gleam in his eye, the funny tenderness he shows to underdogs.” He thought about him as he walked across campus, as he decided which research studies to pursue; he saw how all the work he’s done and will likely ever do traces back to his kid brother, whose loss will always cause him pain even as it deepens the same well of compassion from which his brother taught him to draw, back when they were kids.
“Him being gone, I’ve just got all these parts of how I see the world extracted out of me,” he told me now. “But they’re still there.”
I asked Keltner whether the part of him that’s drawn to awe, wonder, and connection is separate from or intertwined with the sad part. “That question gives me goosebumps,” he replied. “They’re intertwined.”
Eventually, Keltner started to realize that, after the implosion of his childhood family, he’d never allowed himself to feel at home. But maybe it was time to start. Every year at the Berkeley graduation ceremony, he’d instinctively scanned the crowd for the kids who looked lost, the way he once was, the kids floating on their own without a family, who would see their classmates gathered at the picnic tables with a cheerful collection of relatives and wonder why their family couldn’t do that, too.
But he’d been at Berkeley since he was thirty-four; he was fifty-seven now; he wasn’t one of those kids anymore. And he knew that those students, too, those refugees from broken families, wouldn’t be kids forever, either. They would go out into the world the way he once did; they would do their work and have their adventures; they would live in the shadow of their losses and in the light of new loves; and maybe they’d repeat their childhood family patterns and maybe they wouldn’t; but all of them would be touched by the people they’d loved most, and all of them would have the capacity, just like Keltner, who learned it from his younger brother, to walk the bridge of sadness, and find the joy of communion waiting on the other side. Just like Keltner, they would make their way home.
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